Quote of the Day
How much knowledge there is in a given society, and how it is distributed, depends crucially on how knowledge is conceived and defined. When a social justice advocate like Professor John Rawls of Harvard referred to how ‘society’ should ‘arrange’ certain outcomes, he was clearly referring to collective decisions of a kind that government makes, using knowledge available to surrogate decision-makers, more so than the kind of knowledge known and used by individuals in the population at large, when making their own decisions about their own lives. As an old saying expressed it: ‘A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him.’
Thomas Sowell
2023
Social Justice Fallacies
Emphasis added.
Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, expressed the same sentiment spending probably an entire chapter on it. He described it as an information problem. People close to the problem are in the best position to solve the problem. Free markets and free minds outperform highly regulated markets and constrained minds.
The correctness of this should be obvious to almost everyone. The implications are broad and damning against central planners and big government in general.
Sowell does not claim credit for it. And as I don’t read Dutch or German, I cannot vouch for the correctness of Grok who has this to say about the origin:
The proverb “A fool may put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him” (or close variants) is a traditional Dutch proverb, first recorded in the 16th–17th century.
The earliest known printed source is in the 1621 edition of Carolus Tuinman’s “De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden” (later editions more famous), but the saying already appears earlier in Dutch and Low German proverb collections.
The closest early attestation is in Jan Gruter’s “Florilegium ethicopoliticum” (1610–1612) and other 17th-century Dutch sources, where it is presented as an already established saying:
Original Dutch form (c. 1620s–1630s): “Een dwaas kan zijn jas beter aantrekken dan een wijs man hem die aantrekken kan.”
A very similar version also appears in German collections around the same time (e.g., Lehmann’s 1639 florilegium).
So, there is no single named individual who is the “first” to say it. It is an anonymous folk proverb that crystallized in the Netherlands/low German-speaking areas in the late 1500s or early 1600s, with the earliest surviving written records appearing around 1610–1630.
No evidence attributes it to any famous writer or philosopher before it appears in these printed proverb collections. Variants later spread into English in the 18th–19th centuries (sometimes misattributed to figures like Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain, but those attributions are false).
Copilot is adamant that Grok is wrong:
That claim is false. Let me break it down carefully:
Carolus Tuinman: Tuinman was a Dutch scholar who indeed published De oorsprong en uitlegging van dagelyks gebruikte spreekwoorden (The Origin and Explanation of Daily Used Proverbs), but not in 1621. His works appeared in the early 18th century (1710s–1720s). So the date 1621 is anachronistic.
Jan Gruter’s Florilegium ethicopoliticum: Gruter (1560–1627) did publish collections of sayings and moral excerpts in the early 17th century, but no attestation of the “coat” proverb exists in his florilegium. Searches of digitized editions show many proverbial contrasts of fools and wise men, but not this wording.
German collections (Lehmann 1639): Lehmann’s Florilegium politicum (1639) is a real work, but again, the coat proverb does not appear in it. German proverb collections of the 17th century contain many fool/wise man contrasts, but not this specific imagery.
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